On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 07:25:35PM +0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> Hi Eric,
>
> Eric Oyen wrote on Sat, Jul 28, 2012 at 07:57:59AM -0700:
>
> > its too bad there is no way to convert back from html.
>
> That wouldn't be impossible to write; but it would be an awful
> lot of work, probably at least two weeks of work for somebody
> very familiar with the mandoc(1) internals like kristaps@ or
> myself.
>
> The main reason not even to attempt to write that back-converter
> is that i expect it would almost certainly not help you at all,
> whereas much of the help we could give you could probably be put
> together with a few minutes of work once we understand what exactly
> the problems really are. Not all suggestions will be useful,
> and trying them out and understanding them will almost certainly
> take more than a few minutes of work on your part, but still...
>
> The crucial point for getting correct backwards conversion
> would be to always have the right "class" attributes in every
> HTML element. If you would edit the HTML code with some random
> WYSIWYG editor, those attributes would almost certainly not get
> added when adding new elements, would probably get lost when
> changing existing elements, and i doubt that you could even hear
> them in the first place.
>
> Besides, even if your HTML editor had a way to add the required
> markup, you would still have to learn what markup is required.
> That's just the same difficulty as learning real mdoc(7) syntax -
> except that you would do the same in a different syntax than
> everybody else, which is not likely to make getting help any easier.
>
> > that would make life a lot easier for some of us who can code
> > there (not me).
>
> If you want to contribute to manuals, you really have to edit
> mdoc(7) files. At least so far, i can't imagine any shortcut.
>
> So what you need to figure out is:
> What do you need to read and edit the real mdoc(7) files,
> directly? Like this one:
>
>
> http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/bin/cat/cat.1?rev=1.31;content-type=text%2Fplain
>
> Editing manuals means editing those, with a plain text editor,
> and no editing anything else.
>
> > still, having options for conversion from the new man format to css,
> > html, pdf and others is very nice indeed. the nice thing about a
> > properly formatted pdf is that I can use a number of very
> > accessible programs to read it.
>
> I'm still slightly confused that you can read a terribly complicated
> format like PDF but a simple format like ASCII text causes problems.
I think Eric mentioned that ^H that mandoc puts in causes him pain.
Filtering them out is simple, like sombody already mentioned: col(1).
I am wondering: if reading the source would even be easier...
-Otto
> Of course, use whatever works for you, i'm not arguing that!
> But technically, it ought to be *MUCH* easier, several magnitudes
> of difficulty lower, to make ASCII text accessible than to make PDF
> accessible in whatever way required...
>
> [...]
> > I hope no one minds that I shamelessly plug the OpenBSD site
> > in the subject line.
>
> Oh please don't.
> That conspiciously looks like cargo cult to me.
> And even if it were effective, standard nettiquette is still
> much more important (here: use concise, expressive subject lines).
>
> Whether or not Google lists openbsd.org is mostly irrelevant.
> Whatever Google does is not a good reason to do anything
> in a different way than in the sane way.
>
> Yours,
> Ingo
